how_tofandomcom-20200214-history
Talk:How To
= Main discussion page = Cleanup I've archived the old messages. moa3333 21:05, 12 December 2006 (UTC) :thanks, it has been a while since any of us has gotten to that 71.208.122.96 06:20, 13 December 2006 (UTC) OpenSource Laser Business opens in New York This article I read recently. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/12/233215&threshold=-1 It says that they even teach, and help to start such business. Thanks for Moa3333 for cleaning up the page. --Inyuki Appropedia Another wiki with howtos is Appropedia, the wiki site for appropriate technology, sustainability and international development. There's some overlap, but Appropedia has more specific subject areas (especially appropriate technology) and also has projects, case-studies etc. If there are relevant howtos here, please let us know at Appropedia - add the link yourself, or leave a note at the Village pump. Likewise, you may wish to link some of Appropedia's Howtos from here. I'm keen to see collaboration between these wikis as much as possible, and want to make sure we link to each other and transwiki where appropriate. --Singkong2005 15:43, 18 December 2006 (UTC) :It's good to see you chose the GFDL for that wiki's license which does make collaboration possible since content can be shared between these two wikis, as well as with other sites, like Wikipedia or Wikibooks. Angela talk 16:24, 24 December 2006 (UTC) ::Yes - it took a long discussion, but that was the reason we went with GFDL. ::I'm not very familiar with licensing, but I'm told that GFDL requires attribution. Does this mean we need some kind of attribution notice for any page that takes a significant amount of text from another GFDL source? If you can suggest a good link on that topic it would be much appreciated, so I can add that to the appropriate page on Appropedia. --Singkong2005 16:49, 24 December 2006 (UTC) :::The template at Wikia:Template:Wikipedia can be adapted to give attribution. See Wikipedia:Project:Copyrights for more information. Angela talk 21:25, 24 December 2006 (UTC) =New Object page design?= *User:ZyMOS/temp/neo-object I have been thinking about the object page design and listening my friends' opinions about it. one major problem they have is, It is not obvious that the link on the object name goes to wikipedia I would have to agree with them. One idea i though would also be useful is have a very short description of the object, on the page. No more than 5 words, just so people know is the object is what they think it is, without having to goto wikipedia and back . So here is my solution to the above stated and more. *User:ZyMOS/temp/neo-object The page intro could be a simple template exp : Let me know what you folks think, and if naything can be improved ZyMOS 07:11, 24 December 2006 (UTC) :So i worked on it a little more, and made this test example, cheeseburger. Here are also some stuff about my idea and other examples. User:ZyMOS/temp :ZyMOS 06:37, 25 December 2006 (UTC) =277 howtos and 108 Guides= Not bad, and our spanish site has over 80 howtos. We are really becoming an awsome site ZyMOS 18:12, 9 January 2007 (UTC) :Yes, that was really amazing to see the appearance of the ES version Inyuki 07:36, 26 March 2007 (UTC) What I see wrong Wrong is that many pages still have only links to some other pages. It is the job of Google, not us to collect links; and I guess that most people will find it easier to find the links through Google. It's not so interesting to just browse the links. I think we have to create the genuine content of our own. Inyuki 07:38, 26 March 2007 (UTC) = Sometimes it is a better way of writing Howtos = Here is how: to write Your real stories of accomplishing things, rather than writing abstract howtos I started doing it this way now in the Japanese version of the Wiki. Asking people to write their stories of a accomplishing things, with the comments on how it may be possible to do the same thing in different circumstances, may be more effective way of actually getting people writing howtos than only asking "How to do X?" Here are the reasons: * Stories of doing something are something that people already know, whereas trying to write a highly abstract howto for a number of situations is almost impossible, and this leads only to confusion, because the writer does not know how to do it in a number of other situations that he or she has probably no experience of, except the particular situation that he had done it in. * It is much more time-efficient to share the personal experiences than trying to write abstract workable howtos for any possible situation, because you do not need to use much time to think of all the possible situations, and only to tell your unique story well, the one and only that you are 100% competent about that it had succeeded. * Stories are easier to read. They are more fun and more straightforward and natural method of expression. From the ancient times stories were the form of knowledge that remained in people's minds best. It is perhaps so because it is the closest thing to reality that one can get in a written form. Understanding the reality well was what was important in survival of any living being. (Abstraction is further from actual reality than the experience is.) * People will be more confident trying to repeat the story, because they can be sure that it has once been done, and not something that one just has to follow and see. Also, there is a person who is responsible for the story, and can answer the questions through talk page. This is my personal opinion, but I think that writing an open story, and giving your situtational background, your thoughts while solving a task may be much more educational. I really miss the times of books. Is it that people have lost their skills in story telling? Inyuki 08:21, 15 March 2007 (UTC) : By the way, I think that scientists are already doing it this way, - they write descriptions of the experiments the way that other researchers could repeat them and check, and the best is to write a story how they managed to do that, in very detail. However, in case of Wikihowto, perhaps we should try to consider a general audience rather than narrower scientific community. Of course, that would require much more writing... Inyuki 06:02, 16 March 2007 (UTC) ::Yet I think reading a real story composed of paragraphs where for every paragraph the author is first off explaining what actually was done, and then commenting the choices and grounding them by the authors thoughts and considerations, can be more interesting to read, than reading only the directions, only steps. Inyuki 11:04, 17 March 2007 (UTC) ::: It may well be that if every decent creation will have it's open story, much more people will be able to catch up with the technological progress. This awareness of the stories may be very important approaching the technological singularity. Inyuki The Japanese version... I mean, what I did in the Japanese wiki, is I put the invitation in the main page to write creation stories, and started explaining how did I create a simple Japanese-Lithuanian online dictionary for mobile phones using a rental server in Lithuania, not only as an example of the explanation method, but because one Japanese visitor of the dictionary asked me, how did I do it. I have put the link to it in the main page as an example. I think it is a good way to make people catch the idea of actually sharing their production stories. I started with the object link, linking directly to the online dictionary, and then follows a short introduction, why did I thought of making a dictionary, when. Then I just straightforwardly wrote what I did, braking down the big steps into small paragraphs in such a sequence that one paragraph but ennumerates a number of actions I did (so that the reader could just repeat the actions if he or she wants), and the following paragraph explains my choice and thoughts. What is specific about the way I did, is perhaps that I just wrote down just the way I did, not "how to do". For instance, - that I just found a piece of code on the internet or PHP help, and just changed some variables. (i.e., username, password). So the one who reads can kind of understand the simplicity. Thinking of the next steps, I thought I would like to know a story of ZyMOS writing the bot for Wikihowto, that actually works :-), just as an instance of actually-working knowledge. MediaWiki also has it's story, from what did the developers start? What is particularly their production, and what are the parts that they have used from somewhere else? (If we understand that, we could much better contribute to it's development, wouldn't we?) I think people should be quite good at remembering their own story, and there should be ways of asking to write them it down. If we had such stories for every product, I believe that even the open source projects could be more accessible, even for non-programmers. (So, I will try to put the link to the page of the dictionary, to it's explanation.) If we explain our thought processess, then I think others will understand how actually simple the things are. And who will benefit from it, is all mankind. Important, in order to be as close to the reality as possible, one has to be as OPEN and HONEST about writing how exactly he or she did that and how thought of doing so, as it is possible. Telling the pure true in the first place, without much abstraction or pondering about other possible situations is what is a good way not to get confused, I think. That is the thoughts for now. みんでぃ 17:02, 19 March 2007 (UTC) : I drafted both howto install FreeDOS in QEMU and howto test if your BSD system supports IPv6 based from my experience, but nowhere in either document do I cite my experience. Further, if I actually wanted to document a "success story", I would have to write howtos like "howto run DOS programs above Unix" or "howto add your BSD system to the IPv6 internet". Maybe later, I will work upon that. --Kernigh 15:46, 27 March 2007 (UTC)